Free Energy: "Bang Pop"

Director Josh Nussbaum on his giddy retro high school throwdown

From Elastica's"Stutter" to Dirty's"Hit Da Floe", great music videos are bursts of sound and vision that leave an indelible impression. Director's Cut is a Pitchfork News feature in which we chat with music video directors about their creations. The men and women behind the camera are often overlooked in today's YouTube era, but this feature aims to highlight their hard work while showcasing the best videos currently linking around the internet. A little behind-the-scenes dirt couldn't hurt, too.

Director Josh Nussbaum's video for Free Energy's dizzy power-pop jam "Bang Pop" works as a glorious pile-up of 70s and 80s horny-teenager movies: The girls-locker-room strip-down, the fire-alarm prank, the dancing gorilla. There's an innocent sense of fun to the clip's debauched hijinks, with the band reveling in playing up the classic hesher archetype and taking over the school. Like the classic 80s MTV videos it references, the "Bang Pop" video delights in its own cartoonish primary-color fakeness. When the members of the band stagger out of a bathroom stall, a cloud of smoke surrounding them and goofy grins on their faces, you can tell this is either how they spent their high-school years or how they wish they had.

Pitchfork spoke with Nussbaum about Rock 'n' Roll High School, wheelchair pyrotechnics, and the best place to find girls willing to get naked in music videos:

Free Energy: "Bang Pop" [director: Josh Nussbaum]

Pitchfork: This is obviously a super fun video. Was it fun to make? Or was it hard to wrangle all those people to look like they were having fun?

JN: I kept promising myself that I was going to have fun making the video. This was the mantra that I would repeat every morning. By nighttime, I needed to remind myself that I should be having fun with it. It was a huge challenge. The casting was left until two or three days before the shoot. At a certain point, I just had to put the casting into God's hands. We shot on the week of the ash cloud, so I lost a couple key members of my crew, and I ended up taking a lot of that responsibility on myself. The creative process of making the video was incredibly fun, but my personal expectations that are so high that I'm constantly having to remind myself to have a good time.

Pitchfork: Was it your idea to make the video an homage to the late 70s and early 80s high school comedies?

JN: This idea came directly from Paul [Sprangers], the leader singer. He was really inspired by the Ramones' Rock 'n' Roll High School. This was sort of his fantasy to play out, and everyone involved sort of adopted this fantasy because it's pretty much similar to something we had all dreamed of. We're all about the same age, 30 years old, and it's really reminiscent of all the things we wanted to do as kids.

Pitchfork: What other movies are in there? There seems to be a little bit of Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

JN: A lot of the references came from John Hughes movies. And there's definitely a little bit of "Hot For Teacher" in there, a little bit of Twisted Sister, and Rock 'n' Roll High School. All the creative development work on the video was done between rural Africa and Philadelphia because the producer and I were actually traveling on another project. We were just in this world with no internet, no phone, no electricity, no nothing-- just dreaming about this teenage fantasy. And I think that some of that is reflected in the final product, just being so far from it.

Pitchfork: The performances in the video-- really, just faces people make-- are great: The shifty face the drummer makes when he's taking out his drumsticks at the beginning, the singer when he's coming out of the bathroom stall. How did you get those out of everyone?

JN: There's a fine line in the video between campy humor and a genuine reality. Each one of the characters was created around the casting, and we had a really good sense of who characters would be, of what type of archetypes we were looking for. When we got to the casting, I just approached it with a really open mind. There was a Mexican exchange student who showed up, and so I just decided that this is the shy Mexican girl who is there that day for Cultural Day. She's going to be dressed in her native wear and giving a demonstration in her second period class. And so she became that girl and motivated all of the direction to her. Everybody was typecast and very comfortable in their skin. I would say the same is true for the band. This is not really far from the sentiments by which they live.

Pitchfork: Why are there so many bubbles in the video?

JN: The bubbles were a momentary inspiration in my first meeting with the production designer. I was just trying to intimidate him by creating an impossible list of requests. I probably said, "Oh, and of course there's gotta be bubbles the whole time". So I was very pleased when I showed up and there were bubbles the whole time.

Pitchfork: In the hallway scene, Evan Wells, the band's bass player, is doing all these wheelchair tricks. How many times did he fall down?

JN: Evan is just really good. In fact, he didn't fall once. Half of my directions in that scene were to him because he was at the front of the scene. I really wanted him to fall; I thought that would be great for the video. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. He did give it his all, he just didn't fall. The wheelchair was supposed to have fireworks shooting off it, but there were a lot of small to large pyrotechnics-- as well as all sorts of nudity and drug references-- that were at some point slated for the script, but fell by the wayside.

Pitchfork: Well, you did get some nudity in there. How did you find the girls who stripped in the locker room?

JN: If you're looking for girls to appear naked in your music videos, you can do casting sessions at Urban Outfitters. For some reason, those girls love to get naked. And they're also really nice people.

Pitchfork: How uncomfortable was it to shoot that? Or was it not an issue?

JN: It wasn't an issue. We filmed with a closed set, and I always make the offer to get naked. Unfortunately, nobody ever takes me up on it. I don't ask anybody to do anything they're not comfortable with, and I just had such a good rapport with everybody on set and didn't really hear too many nos. I went home wondering what else I could've gotten away with.